For this lesson, I'm using the Premiere Pro project file 09_01 Frame rates and audio channels.prproj. You'll find that project file with the media associated with this lesson. Double-click on the file to open it in Premiere Pro CC. The video is comprised of a series of still images called frames, that are displayed so quickly, they appear to be continuous. Different camera systems use different frame rates. And it's common practice to record a high frame rate on location, so you can playback the action in slow motion in post-production. It's also common to use each audio channel in your recording separately, rather than capturing stereo or just mono sound. To work with these kinds of media, you'll need to tell Premiere Pro CC how to interpret your clips. I have a clip in my Source monitor, it's this GOPR-2562.MP4 file, that was recorded at a very high frame rate. It was recorded at almost 120 frames per second. If I play this back now though, you can see it plays in slow motion. That's because although it was recorded at about 120 frames per second, it's playing back at 30 frames per second. And notice I've got a sequence open in the Timeline panel, Slow Motion Sequence, that has just that clip inside of it. To change the playback speed for the clip in Premiere Pro CC, I'm going to right-click on it in the Project panel. I'm going to choose Modify, and Interpret Footage... This brings up the Modify Clip dialog. And there are quite a lot of options here to change the way Premiere Pro CC interprets your media. Right now, the Frame Rate setting is set to Assume a particular Frame Rate: 30.00 fps. But I'm going to change this to Use Frame Rate from File, which is a little over 119.... frames per second. Now I'll click OK. And right away you can see a change occurs in the Sequence. This clip is showing a lot of missing content. And that's because the clip is playing back faster. All of the media is there; it's just playing back quicker than it was before. Let's play this back in the Sequence. And that's actually normal playback speed. It's much more than your eye needs to see smooth motion. If you've already added a clip to a Sequence, as I had done here, when you make changes to the playback speed by adjusting the interpretation of the clip in the Project panel, Premiere Pro CC won't change the duration in your Sequence. And let's check out another scenario. I have another Sequence here with a clip that has audio primarily recorded on one channel, channel 1 or left, but there's some audio on the right channel, channel 2, as well. Let's have a listen. ... born in Japan and grew up there until I was five, then moved to... You can see the difference in the level by looking at the waveforms in the Sequence. And in fact, if I double-click to open up this clip in the Source monitor, and switch to viewing the waveform, which I can do quite quickly by clicking on this little Drag Audio Only button under the picture. It's even more visible that there's a difference between the two. Again, I'm going to right-click on the clip in the Project panel. I'm going to choose Modify. And this time I'm going to choose Audio Channels... I'm going to switch the Preset to Mono, which means that I'll get two audio clips instead of one. One for the left audio and one for the right. And by default, they're set up so that Clip 1 gets the left audio, Clip 2 gets the right audio. I'll click OK. I get a warning letting me know that nothing's going to change for any sequences that already contain this clip. I'll say Yes. And let's take that same clip and drag it into the Sequence again. I'll just shorten the Audio 1 track, so you can see a little more clearly. Increase the height for Audio 2, and drag over a little with the navigator. We now have two separate audio clips, one for each audio channel. And of course, we don't need the second one. In my Timeline panel, I have the Linked Selection option turned off, which means if I select this unwanted audio clip, only it is selected and I can press the Delete key to remove it. Remember: The Linked Selection option means any video and audio that was originally imported together will be selected if you click on either one. By the way, there's a slightly quicker way of achieving the same result. If I go back into that Modify dialog, and set the Number of Audio Clips to 1, and I'll just press the Tab key to come out of that Number of Audio Clips dialog. Now only one audio clip will be added to the sequence, when I edit this shot into the Timeline panel. I can choose which of the audio channels is used, left or right, click OK. I get that same warning dialog. And if I drag the clip into the Sequence, I just get that one audio channel. Most of the time you won't need to adjust the way Premiere Pro CC interprets your media files. But if you're working with slow-motion video or professionally recorded sound, just remember to right-click on the clips and choose Modify. If you have a batch of clips to change, select them all before you right-click. The workflow is the same.

What you learned: Change how frame rate and audio channels are interpreted

Video clips are made up of a series of still frames that are displayed fast enough to give the appearance of continuous motion.

Audio channels are combined to produce a single sound mix. Most of the time you will have stereo, two-channel or mono, single-channel audio.

Change the way Premiere Pro interprets the frame rate for a clip by right-clicking it in the Project panel and choosing Modify > Interpret Footage. You can choose a different frame rate, which will change the playback speed and duration of the clip.

Change the way Premiere Pro interprets audio channels for a clip by right-clicking it in the Project panel and choosing Modify > Audio Channels. You can choose which audio channels are used, and how they will be added to sequences.

Change clip playback speed

You can change the duration or speed of a clip in a sequence.

For this lesson, I'm using the Premiere Pro CC project file 09_02 Clip playback speed.prproj. You can find this project file with the media associated with this lesson. Double-click on it to open it in Premiere Pro CC. Slow motion is a director's favorite adding gravitas and a special focus on events as they unfold. You won't always have footage that was shot at a high frame rate to give you smooth slow motion in Premiere Pro CC. Still you can also make adjustments to playback speed in a sequence. And the results can be fantastic. And let's see how. I'm going to start out by making a change to this "Kids rolling a tire" shot. Let's watch a little piece of it as it is. I'm going to right-click on the clip in the Sequence, and go to the Speed/Duration... option. This brings up the Clip Speed / Duration dialog. I've got a few interesting options here. I can Reverse the Speed. I can specify, whether I want clips on the timeline to move out of the way if I change the playback duration by changing the Speed. And up at the top I've got the new percentage of Speed I want. I can also specify a new Duration. The little Chain icon on the right links these two together. So if I type in 25, the Duration updates automatically. I'll just undo with Control + Z on Windows or Command + Z on Mac OS, and break that Chain. And now I'll type in 25. And the Duration stays the same. The Duration we're looking at here is really the duration of the clip in the Sequence. I can make the contents of that clip as long and slow as I like. And it's not quite the same thing as changing the piece of that clip, that's been incorporated into the current Sequence. I'm happy with this amount of the clip. Five seconds in one frame. But I want the speed of the contents to playback slower. You'll see what I mean when I click OK and play it back. We're not seeing as much of the content, because of course we're only getting a quarter of it now. However, the playback is a bit jumpy. Premiere Pro CC has filled the extra frames needed to playback at the slower speed. And the default setting is not particularly smooth, but it's the lowest effort for your computer to playback. Let's switch this to the highest quality. I'm going to right-click again, and I'm going to choose Speed/Duration... And I'm going to use this Time Interpolation menu to specify Optical Flow. This effect is extremely high quality. And your computer will need to process it before it will playback. That's why there's a red line along the top of the Timeline panel. It indicates that an effect needs to be processed. And processing is called rendering. With the Timeline panel active I'm going to go to the Sequence menu. And I'm going to choose Render Effects In to Out. You'll notice the keyboard shortcut for this is the Enter key. By default, the sequence will play when your system finishes rendering effects. So I just stopped it there. I'll navigate back over to that clip. And let's take a look. Beautiful. There's a dedicated tool for changing the playback speed of clips, too. A little later on the Timeline here, I'm gonna delete this Bridge track.mp4 clip. I'm just selecting it, and pressing the Delete key. And now I'm going to select the Rate Stretch Tool, which is available by clicking and holding on the Ripple Edit Tool. With this tool selected, if I trim a clip by clicking on the end of it and dragging, I won't change the piece of the clip that I'm using, instead I'll change the playback speed. And in this case I'm going to change the playback speed by exactly the amount I need to fill the gap. So I'm clicking and dragging, and releasing the mouse. Now I'm going to right-click on the clip, go to Speed/Duration..., set that Time Interpolation to Optical Flow, and click OK. Once again, I'll go to the Sequence menu and Render Effects In to Out. Navigate back over to the clip. And let's take a look. Perfect. Now that I finished using the Rate Stretch Tool, I'll go back to the Selection Tool and I'm ready to continue with my edit. That's an overview of playback speed options on the Timeline in Adobe Premiere Pro CC.

What you learned: Change playback speed

To change the playback speed, or precisely adjust the duration of a clip in a sequence, right-click the clip and choose Speed/Duration.

In the Clip Speed/Duration dialog box, choose a new playback speed as a percentage, and choose a Time Interpolation option. This sets the way Premiere Pro renders the new playback speed:

Frame Sampling gives the best playback performance but not the smoothest playback.

Frame Blending is better quality but takes more work for your computer to play.

Optical Flow is the highest quality. For this option to play back in real time, your computer will need to pre-process the appearance of the video at the new speed. Pre-processing is called rendering. If you see a red line along the top of the Timeline panel, you will probably need to render the sequence to preview that part of your sequence smoothly. This doesn’t affect your final output, just your previews.
To render effects in your sequence, make sure the Timeline panel is active (with the blue outline) and choose Sequence > Render Effects In to Out.

In the Tools panel, click and hold your mouse button on the Ripple Edit tool to display the Rate Stretch tool. The Rate Stretch tool allows you to trim clips to change the playback speed — perfect for exactly filling a gap with a clip. Trim with the Rate Stretch tool by dragging the ends of clips, and the playback speed will change by exactly the amount needed to achieve the new playback duration.

Choose the Selection tool when you have finished working with the Rate Stretch tool.

Set audio level for multiple clips

There are two ways to change the volume of several clips at the same time. Both options work well: Audio Gain adjustment (useful for music clips), and the Essential Sound panel (useful for dialogue).

For this lesson, I'm using the Premiere Pro CC project file 09_03 Set audio level for multiple clips.prproj. You'll find this project file with the media associated with this lesson. Double-click on the project file to open it in Premiere Pro CC. When making adjustments to audio levels, you'll sometimes going to have a whole batch of clips that you want to change. Sometimes you'll want to make one standard adjustment to a group of clips like music tracks, which are generally too loud to be useful in an edited sequence. Sometimes you'll want to make sure multiple sections of speech have the same level. Let's look at both of these in practice. In the Project panel I have three music clips. And they all have different levels. I'll open one of these up by double-clicking on it. You can see the waveform in the Source monitor. As you probably know already when you see a waveform, the taller the waveform, the louder the music is at that point in time. I'm going to select all three of these clips. I'm just lassoing them here in the Project panel. But you could just as easily make a Shift key selection, a list selection. And now with them selected I'm going to go to the Clip menu. I'm going to choose Audio Options and Audio Gain... I'm going to allow Premiere Pro CC to automatically analyze the audio level for these clips, to make sure they match a level that I want for my Sequence. To do that I'm going to go to "Normalize All Peaks to:". And I'm going to type in what's generally a good number to start with: -18 dB. I'll click OK. And you can see right away that waveform is shorter. I'll double-click on a couple of other clips here. And you can see they all have that smaller waveform. So now we're ready to use these clips without overwhelming the soundtrack. That's a quick workflow when you have multiple clips in the Project panel. But what about if you have clips already in a Sequence? Here we've got multiple voiceover clips, and they seem to have different levels. You can see the waveforms are different heights. I'll play back the first two. It's clear that these were recorded at different volumes, and we want them to match. I'm going to go to the Audio workspace. And I'm going to select all of these clips together. I'm just going to click and lasso across to select all of them. Now, in the Essential Sound panel, I'll choose Dialogue, Loudness and click Auto-Match. Right away you can see those waveforms have changed. And all of the clips now match. Let's listen to those first two voiceover clips again. Perfect. Now that I have all these clips selected in the Sequence, I can right-click if I want on any of them, go to Audio Gain..., and use the same options as I found in the Project panel to normalize and automatically adjust the audio level for the clips here. I'll just cancel out of this dialog for now. And now that I've finished making this audio adjustment, I'm going to go back to the Editing workspace to continue working on my project. This kind of automatic audio level adjustment can be a huge timesaver, and makes sure you have the right settings for your soundtrack.

What you learned: Change volume for multiple clips

To change the volume for several clips at once in the Project panel, select the clips and choose Clip > Audio Options > Audio Gain. In the Audio Gain dialog box, choose Normalize All Peaks To, set a new volume (–18dB is popular for music), and click OK. The level of all the selected clips is adjusted automatically to match the volume you chose.

Use the Essential Sound panel to change the volume for multiple dialogue clips already edited into a sequence. Select the clips and choose the Dialogue option in the Essential Sound panel. In the Loudness section, click Auto-Match. The clips will all be adjusted automatically to an industry-standard volume for dialogue.

You can use the Audio Gain option in a sequence too. Select the clips you want to change and choose Clip > Audio Options > Audio Gain.